From Death to Life How Salvation Works with Allen Nelson IV

Welcome to The Wrap Report with Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications. This is the ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Why Salvation and Hypocrisy Matter

All right, welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report. Today's topic we're going to be talking about, well, we're going to talk about salvation, how it works. What does it mean to be saved? Boy, is that a confusing terminology these days, isn't it?

And we're going to have an author of the book, From Death to Life, How Salvation Works. So welcome to the airwaves, Alan Nelson IV. How are you, Alan?

I'm doing well, Andrew. It's a privilege to be on and thank you for the opportunity to talk about this today.

Well, before we get into your book, I first want to let you introduce yourself to our audience. Not everyone may... They may not know who you are, John MacArthur follows after you, but everyone may not know that.

Yeah. Well, first of all, that's not true. I'm a nobody. I'm just... I live in Central Arkansas and I pastor a Southern Baptist Church here in Arkansas, Second Baptist Church of Perryville. My wife and I have been married a little over 12 years and we have five children.

The oldest is just turned 11 and the youngest will turn two in May. So that's a really quick introduction. How much further do you want me to go? No, that's good.

And so you also blog and this is how I became aware of you. You are a blogger on thingsabove .us, which is... I kind of know a bunch of the other bloggers over there. And so that's how I had found out about you and your book.

But I do want to discuss with you the issue of salvation. You wrote a book on something that, boy, there's been a lot of trees that have been killed over this book, hasn't there? Over the topic, I should say.

Yeah, that's right. First off, why do you write the book? Why do you feel that there's been so much on this topic and so much disagreement on this topic?

Yeah, so I've talked with some other brothers who have asked me similar questions, just either on Twitter or phone conversation or in person. And you know, Andrew, the heart behind why I wrote this book is obviously I wanted people to read it, but I wanted people in my community to read it.

And I feel like giving them a book that I wrote increases the chances of them reading it. So I'm not trying to come at this as saying I know something that all these other people in the history of the church don't know.

I'm just trying to offer a fresh perspective from the 21st century of just a pastor who is dealing with these situations. You know, that's another impetus of just dealing with these situations. This is not one of those things that you...this isn't talking about the difference between supra and infralapsarianism.

This is talking about the real-time, very extremely practical things that we have to deal with in the church. How does a person move from death to life? How are they converted? So that's really the motivation.

That's why I wrote this and particularly thinking about the people in my community and my congregation.

Yeah, and the thing is, you make a valid point because someone who encouraged me to write my first book, that was a very similar reason he gave. Just so that you could be able to say, here's something I wrote, it does get a person more likely to read it.

And I think that there's some people who they want to be the big name author. You're not. I was greatly encouraged by something you had said even in the prefix to your book. You said, quote, 20 years from now, you may have forgotten this book, but if the principles we discuss within stick, I'm fine with that unquote.

I think that's great because that's the heart. It's not about you and I. It's not about people knowing our name. I say this when I do street evangelism all the time. It doesn't matter if you know who I am.

It matters whether you know Christ. When you put this book out there, it was interesting because you started off this book dealing with a passage of scripture. One that I say is the scariest passage in all the Bible, Matthew 7, 21 to 23.

Why did you start there? Well, I think, and part of this is some of the guys I follow, the John MacArthur, and I don't know if you've ever heard of Richard Owen Roberts, but there's just been some men influential in my life that I think that they're right in the sense that there are people who are in our pews who are unconverted.

Not just people in our roles, but people who occasionally dabble in and out of the church or maybe even are members and come quite frequently. It really concerns me, Andrew, that they genuinely think they're converted, but they're not.

That's really one of the hearts of this book is there are people who I call the walking dead that are just walking around and they have a formal sort of religion, but they really don't have, they don't love Christ, bottom line.

Folks who are familiar with the Ray Comfort calls that a false conversion. I call it hypocrisy. I think most people will hear that Christ spoke more about hell than heaven. A lot of people hear that. Christ spoke more about money than heaven and hell combined.

What I don't see a lot of people speak about is that Christ spoke about hypocrisy more than heaven, hell, and money combined. Why do you think hypocrisy is such a big deal when we talk about the area of salvation?

Well, I think, well, I'm pretty convinced biblically that the human heart is a mess and the human heart is willing to do what it can to assuage its guilt. If you look around culture, everybody knows we're guilty.

That's manifest either in false religions. It's manifest in secularism. Nobody wants to hear about how homosexuality, abortion is wrong. They hate it. They hate hearing that because they already are dealing with guilt.

This comes into Christianity as well, and that is the human heart doesn't want to submit to God, but also doesn't want to feel guilty. How do you deal with that? If you don't want to submit to God and you don't want to feel guilty, well, one outlet in the Bible, well, anyway, one outlet is to try to pretend that you're following God and that in your own mind solves both problems.

Now you're kind of pretending to follow God and your heart doesn't feel the guilt as much per se, and so now you think you've found a solution when in reality you haven't. So hopefully that kind of opens up or answers that question.

That's one way to look at it, I think.

Well, when you look historically, we've seen Constantine comes in and just goes, okay, we're all Christian. And we're going to get into, I want to ask you, what is salvation? I want to be precise in our terminology in a few minutes, but when he just declares that, you end up having people who are non-regenerate who suddenly are being told they're now Christian because the emperor said so.

We end up seeing unregenerate people trying to fit in to a culture of Christians. I think that's similar to what you're describing, and we see some things that they did back then that are still being done today where they want to change the message of Christianity to something that makes them feel more comfortable without really dealing with the real message.

And so you address a little bit in the book the issue of the gimmicks, and let me just read a quote from your book. After the first chapter, you said, quote, it is my hope that we examine the reality of how sinners move from death to life, that in light of truth will shine so brightly that all the gimmickry and worldly entrapments will fall away, unquote.

Why is it so important to get the truth out there over just making people feel good? Like the dramas and the gimmicks, people feel good about it. I mean, Joelstein makes people feel good. What's wrong with that?

Yeah, what's wrong with that is we are coddling people. We're making them comfortable and feeling good all the way into a godless eternity. And by godless, I don't mean that God in hell, they don't get away from God, but God's wrath is manifest for eternity.

And so we're coddling them right up to hell. That's why this matters. So what if you make them feel comfortable and encourage them, quote, unquote, as they make their way to hell and perish for all eternity?

This is serious, as you well know, obviously, but this is serious. And so when we play and try to diminish the realities of a holy God and the necessity of repentance and true faith in Christ, and we boil that down to, hey, just say this prayer and you and God are good, then we are doing great damage to the souls of men and women who we tell them that they're okay when they're not.

So let's talk about the importance of this. I mean, a person could be right in every other area of Christian doctrine. And if they get this one wrong, it literally is the difference between heaven and hell.

And so with that in mind, this is why your book becomes so important, because we need to get this one doctrine right if we're going to have eternal life. So you end up, and I want to deal with some of the chapters, because you end up talking about, as you said earlier, the walking dead.

You have people who are in churches, they're being taught all kinds of Christian doctrine, and yet this one area, they don't want to listen to. You referred to them as walking dead, which I do at least understand the pop culture.

I will admit you have a bunch of pop culture references in there that there's probably a bunch more I didn't get because I don't get all of them. But I do know Walking Dead's some TV show. Yeah. Yeah.

My audience knows that I'm pop culture illiterate. But why do you refer to them as the walking dead?

Well, I think one of the most difficult things, I think this could be very difficult at times to discern a person's salvation, because sometimes you might look at a person and notice that everything they're doing, like nobody has something written on their forehead that just says, I'm lost.

So they're moving, they're participating, and probably if you called them at three in the morning, and you needed help changing your tire, because you're stuck on the side of the road, they might come and help you.

So it's hard to say, well, these people, do they hate God? I mean, experientially, it doesn't seem like that. But the point that I'm trying to make is even though they're walking around and they're moving and they're participating, they have not been born again.

Their heart is a heart of stone. They are dead in their trespasses and sins. And at the end of the day, they are at enmity with God. They do not want God to rule over their life. And it's right and biblical to say they actually do hate God.

Well, Scripture says that we are at enmity, we're His enemies. So that's not a stretch to say that. But when we look at this, we look at people who are walking around spiritually dead, but yet they're in the church.

Do you think the church does kind of a disservice to not be seeking to explain the gospel message to people?

Well, let me use this quick analogy. Would we think that a doctor's office is doing a disservice to people to know that they have terminal cancer that they could possibly cure, but they don't want to say it because, man, wouldn't that ruin your day?

You don't want to hear that, right? So would a hospital or a doctor's office be doing a disservice? I think all of us would say that would be horrible. That would be wicked. A doctor that's just letting people come in and he knows that they have cancer, he could possibly cure it if they would go through the treatment rightly.

But you know what, that would ruin their Monday, so why even tell them? We would all scoff at that. We'd say, that's horrible. You should revoke his license. Well, this is what churches are doing. When we coddle sinners and we say to them, y 'all, you're probably okay, or even worse than that, and put our stamp of approval on them.

And this is something that my own denomination is wrestling with, or I wish would be wrestling with more, but a lot of Southern Baptist churches, even my own church, this is something that we're in our plans to address, but our church roles and the people who come, it just doesn't match up.

And so we as a whole have put stamp of approval on people, telling them, well, we think that you're a Christian, when in reality, many of them are not believers. And so yes, long answer for a short answer here.

Yes, the church is doing a disservice to allow people to remain thinking they're believers when they're not. Yeah, it's funny that you bring that reference up.

It's in your book as well. I have a CD that we give out to folks when we go evangelizing. Because a CD has more intrinsic value, people are less likely to throw it out rather than a gospel track and paper.

And I want to play for you a clip because I use that same analogy at the very beginning of the message that's called the most important message you could ever hear, because I'm trying to do just that with a person who may be a believer or an unbeliever or think they're a believer.

I want to make sure that they understand the importance of that. I use the same analogy. Take a listen and we could see what you think, because this kind of says exactly what you said. Let me ask you a question.

If there were two types of doctors and you had cancer, which of these two doctors would you go to? Doctor number one is a doctor who knows you have the cancer. They know that the treatment is 100 curable.

But the problem is that they don't think you're going to actually go through all of the treatment step by step the way it's prescribed. And therefore they feel it would just be better to tell you to go home and try to get better and to enjoy as much as you can.

Doctor number two tells you that you have cancer. It's a very serious cancer and it will kill you within six months time. However, he's got a cure. It's a very rigorous process and you must follow it exactly.

But he has a way that can be 100 cured of this cancer. Which doctor would you rather go to? I'm sure if you're like me, you'd rather go to a doctor who's going to tell you some bad news, something you don't really want to hear because he's got some good news to follow it.

And the good news is only good when we hear how bad the bad news is. If the doctor just told you what the prescription was without telling you that you had cancer, you wouldn't follow it. And so that's basically a similar message to what you had said.

We want to go to a doctor that's going to give us the truth, not make us feel better. How much more important than in this area, we're talking about spiritual life and death more than physical life and death?

Yeah, absolutely. Wow. And in your analogy, your analogy is spot on. In fact, it's almost like I should put a footnote and say, I hadn't listened to that before I wrote the book, but yeah, very similar.

So why are you telling people, not you, and why are churches telling people you should try Jesus? You know, let's try Jesus and not, why would anybody try Jesus if they don't understand their need for him?

So why would they just want to surrender their life to the God of the universe if they don't understand the problem? So a lot of churches are trying to minimize the reality of our situation and not talking about sin, not talking about the holiness of God, not talking about the reality of hell, but then saying, yeah, but you should try Jesus, he'll make your life better.

And this is, yes, this is a great disservice and how much more wicked is this than the doctor analogy, because this is eternal matters.

Whether the Church Needs an Altar Call

Well, okay. So after a commercial, I want to get us into some trouble probably, but I want to talk about the altar calls and your view on that. So let's talk about that right after this. Okay.

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All right. It's important to understand what we believe. And that's really what we're talking about here, talking about specifically the doctrine of salvation. Now, Pastor Allen, my question to you is, we see altar calls, especially you're a Southern Baptist, especially within Southern Baptists.

I know someone who actually said that if there isn't an altar call in a church, he wouldn't attend it because somehow he thinks that they're going soft on the gospel. So let me ask it this way. First, I already read your book, so I know the answer, but do you think that we need an altar call?

And then the follow-up is, do you see a problem with the altar call being done in churches? And how, in relation to what we were just talking with this good and bad doctor, what does the altar call end up representing?

Yeah. So do we need an altar call? The answer is, for me, it's a no. And the reason is because that's not in the scriptures. And if we're going to hold the sufficiency of scripture, then we have to hold that whatever the Bible tells us about church and salvation and the invitation to the gospel, that is sufficient.

We don't have to come up with new things in order to make the gospel work. So short answer, first one, no. And then the second question, I think, so I want to be careful, I'll actually mention his name, Dr. Herschel York from Southern Seminary encouraged me, the first copy of the book was a little stronger on the altar call, but he encouraged me, and I think rightly so, don't throw out everybody because I think that, so for example, I think that there are people who issue a time at the end of the service, probably similar to what we do where if someone comes forward, that's fine, but it's not geared towards that, the whole service is not rolling towards that, you just kind of have this song at the end of the service and then sometimes maybe someone might come up and want to talk to you, so I'm not talking about that.

But what I am talking about is this, the altar call as I'm defining it is you're geared towards it at the end of the service, you're pleading with people to come forward. When they come forward, you're trying to get them through this quick process of, you know, do you know your sinner?

Yes. Do you want to go to heaven? Yes. Okay, let's say this prayer. And that's problematic for a number of reasons, the first of which I've already mentioned is not in the Bible. The second is because like we mentioned with this doctor situation, what you're doing is you're giving a solution for a problem that they don't understand that they have, if that makes sense.

And then you're not even really giving the solution anyway, because you've turned repentance and faith into just repeating this prayer. And so what has happened is, and I deal with, so I'm on the front lines in this because I'm in the Bible Belt, and I deal with this all the time.

Are you a Christian? Yes. How do you know you're a Christian? Well, when I was such and such age, we had this altar call, I said this prayer, okay, where do you go to church? I don't go to church. Oh, what about, you know, what about your life now?

Well, I'm caught in all these different sins, and I don't care about getting out of them, but I know I'm going to go to heaven because I said this prayer. So yes, it does a great disservice.

Yeah, one of the things when I'm on the streets, especially in the Bible Belt, but when I have someone that says, well, I'm a Christian, you know, I go to church. I like, I think I got this from Gabe Hughes.

He said, what he usually does is, what's the name of the church you're a member of? And when they give the name, he says, so if I call that pastor that he knows who you are, when was the last time you attended there?

And he's like, oh, but what I usually do, I'll give an analogy. I'll say, so, you know, you have a, because what I hear a lot is why I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And I'll say, oh, so you have a personal relationship.

So you talk to him, he talks to you. Oh yeah. I said, I'll say, okay, so let me, let me give you a scenario just to see how, what kind of relationship this would be like. If you got married, you go off to your honeymoon, you come back from the honeymoon and your spouse says to you, hey, that was a great time.

I really enjoyed it. I'm going to go back to my place and I'm going to give you a call, you know, every couple times a month. What would you think? And they're usually like, ah, that's not a relationship.

Because what you end up doing is if you ask them, how many times do you read your Bible? The average I get is a couple of times a month. And so if they admit to that, then you can give this scenario and just say, so if your spouse and you have no relationship, when you're only talking to them a couple of times a month, what kind of relationship is it you're claiming you have?

Because they really don't have one. I mean, with the altar call, and I think you point this out, it really leads, does it not, to easy believism?

Yeah, absolutely. That is an easy believism. What we're saying is you just, we're not, obviously Andrew and I are not trying to make this more difficult than it is, but easy believism is simply just saying, you know what, I don't, I don't have to meet the requirements that Christ caused me to meet.

The requirements Christ caused me to meet is to repent and believe the gospel. But easy believism is, I can just affirm some of these facts in my mind, but nothing really has to change. And repentance is, I can just feel bad for my sins.

That's obviously involved in repentance, but that is not all that repentance is.

Yeah, I mean, it's, we say that salvation is easy, but there is a specific thing where people are walking down an aisle during an altar call, but there's no change in their life. And it's not that we're saying there has to be works for salvation, and we want to get to this in a bit because you give out some how salvation actually works, but it is important for us first to understand when we talk about salvation, because there's so much hypocrisy in the church.

And this is why I like the way you laid out your book. You first address that. And maybe it's because you're in the Bible Belt, but for so many people, I think that the hardest thing is not to get them saved.

It's to get them lost. So especially like in an area like the Bible Belt, I'm in New Jersey, I mean, there's no one pretending to be a Christian here because Christianity is almost going to be outlawed in New Jersey first.

But seriously, I mean, in an area where you do have a lot of people that are putting on the Christian face, the layout of your book, you first address the issue of hypocrisy, identifying what it means to be saved before you get into the whole doctrine and how it works.

So why is it that is important to lay out first before getting into what salvation is?

Well, I mentioned this earlier, but we live in a world where almost everybody from the secular atheist to the Muslim to Jehovah's Witness, all these false worldviews, almost everybody will admit there's something wrong with humanity.

And so Christianity, what you have in the Bible Belt and other places is people giving that kind of admission, oh, yes, of course I'm not. Of course I'm not perfect. Nobody's perfect. And so if you ask people in the Bible Belt, do they need Jesus?

And other places in the United States, do they need Jesus? I think a lot of people actually would probably say, well, yeah, I need, I need Jesus. But the problem is they don't actually believe that. They don't really think, they don't really understand the depth of their loss.

And so the reason that that is so important, if a person doesn't understand the depth of their lostness, then deep in their heart, they may confess to you they need Jesus, but in their heart, they don't really need Jesus.

The person who's gone to prison, the person who's strung out on drugs, the prostitute, those people, they really need Jesus. Me, I'm, you know, I'm not perfect, obviously, but do I really need Jesus? I feel like someone like me, he probably can go ahead and give me a pass.

That's sort of the mentality that we're dealing with. And so if you don't have a firm foundation of what it means that we're separated from God, wicked and vile, apart from Christ, then there's really no cause.

Some people put it this way, you have to preach the law before you can preach the gospel. You have to understand that people have to understand what they've done, how they've broken God's law and how they're separated from God, or otherwise, why would they even care about Christ?

What Salvation Is and How It Begins

Very true. So, I want to move in now to discussing what salvation is, because you lay out in your book, and this is one of the things I really appreciated about your book, you avoid some of the, shall we say, hot button labels that people react to, and instead just find and describe the terminology so that people who have that knee-jerk reaction actually would end up agreeing, I think, with what you've written, because they're not reading into it, meanings that sometimes we have that knee-jerk reaction to.

So after this commercial, what I'd like to do is I want to ask you, what is salvation? And when you say how it works, what is it first? And then let's start talking about how it works.

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Now, Alan, Jeremiah 29 11 is not your life verse, is it?

Well, I'm just over here weeping, and in the fetal position, and it's ruined my life. No, that's a good commercial, that's really good.

So, yeah, I mean, this is, you know, we get into discussing the area of salvation, I really think that's what's lacking is the issue of hermeneutics, how to interpret the Bible. This is why easy believism, all these other things have crept in, and the altar call has been used the way it is, I think, so much because people are not spending the time diligently studying.

And so I do think it's really important because I believe if people understood how to interpret better, maybe you wouldn't have had to need to have the need to write the book you did. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. No. So when we talk about salvation, help me understand when salvation is a broad term, but you're using it in a specific way. When we talk salvation, this causes confusion for some people.

Salvation can be referred to that time that we get redeemed, regenerated. For Christians, that's a past event in time. Salvation can refer to this current state for us when we're being sanctified, we're being made more in the image of Christ.

That's that process. But there's also a salvation referring to a future state for us, that glorification. Now it could refer to all of those, but in your book, you're specifically referring to one of those.

So when you say how salvation works, what are you referring to?

Yeah, and let me clarify as well, because even within the book, I think, although it's maybe not spelled out as specifically, but even in the book, there's a difference between or, sorry, I want to paint a different understanding between justification, regeneration, conversion, justification.

I don't really talk about adoption that much, but that's what I'm really referring to primarily. Although we do also talk about sanctification. But when I talk about how salvation works, primarily I'm talking about that regeneration to conversion to justification, and then how that results, sanctification, in a life that seeks to live holy and separate and under the lordship of Christ.

So we talk about that part where, as we said earlier, you mentioned we go from being an enemy of God to a child of God. Let's talk through that process when we say how salvation works. What exactly goes on?

You give, that's actually what we should start with. You point out in your chapter, no news is bad news. You talk about the fact that the fall affected every human, and you were specific in what it affected.

So how did the curse of sin affect humanity?

Maybe an easier question is how did it not? But the point, hopefully for your listeners, I imagine most are probably well studied in these things, but for those who are listening or not, what we're saying is the fall affected humanity in every way imaginable.

And so when you talk, I don't think I used the term total depravity, perhaps I do, but when we say words like total depravity, we don't mean that every human is as evil as they possibly can be, but we do mean that the effect of the fall is total.

Our minds, our wills, our hearts, our desires, every single thing about humanity is affected because of the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve.

And so our thinking's affected?

Our thinking, yes. Our thinking, our choices, our quote unquote free will, everything is affected, yes.

And so, because you went to really where the heart of the issue is, where people debate over, you mentioned our quote unquote free will. We would agree we have choices, we have a will, but was that, in your view, was that affected by the fall?

Absolutely.

And we see this experientially, so Andrew, I don't know if you're, are you a vegetable guy? You like vegetables? I eat vegetables. So let's pretend for a moment you don't like broccoli, you just can't stand it.

And I say to you, yeah, but just choose to like it. Just choose to like broccoli. Well, you can't do that. Why? Because you don't like broccoli. Or if I put, you know, rancid meat in front of you that a buzzard would eat, you know, just choose to like that.

Well, you're not going to do that. And nobody would say, yeah, but I got free will. No one would make that argument in those situations. And then when it, so when it comes to the will, and I'm not saying anything new or fresh, I mean, this is in rich history of Christianity, and obviously I think biblical as well.

The will is constrained by its desire. So the will is free to do what it wants to do. And the problem is lost people don't want Christ. No one seeks after God.

Yeah, and that's the thing, Peale, people have a hard time with to realize that our will is enslaved to sin. Yes. And if you don't recognize that, you're not going to, you're going to have a lot of difficulty, I think, when we discuss what salvation is.

You end up in the book, you give kind of a two-step initiatives, and you have two steps there. What do you see is when we look at the steps, how is it that salvation works, right? Because that's what your book is trying to answer.

So how does salvation work? The gospel must be proclaimed. And when I say that, I don't mean that a person needs to just hear the gospel in a church service. That's wonderful. They might hear Andrew preaching on the street or our friend Michael Coughlin preaching on the street.

They might hear, they might receive a tract or they might hear Todd Frill. You know what I'm saying? Or they might read it. They may read a blog on the internet. But the point is, the gospel must be proclaimed or published in some way.

And I'm definitely moving away from the idea of, well, maybe if we don't share the gospel, God is just going to work in somebody's dream or something. I'm pretty adamant that we have to get the gospel to people.

And once the gospel gets to people, then it's up to the Lord. And we're preaching the gospel and we're not just leaving it there. But as Paul says, we're imploring men to be reconciled to God. We're pleading with them, turn from your sins, put your faith in Christ.

But what has to happen after that is God must work in their life. He must initiate a response. This is clear all over the Bible. And even people who disagree theologically, if you can sit them in a room and talk to them about this, most of the time, they will at least, I'm talking about soteriologically, they disagree about how salvation works.

Most will admit, yes, okay, yes. God, a person doesn't just wake up and choose Christ. God must initiate, He must draw them because that is the reality of where we've been left with dead in our sins. So the gospel must be proclaimed and God must initiate a response.

But isn't it the way we live? I mean, isn't it just, you know, we should, we should, you know, live a life in such a way that sometimes we need to use words, but our life should be the gospel? I'm hanging up now.

No, no, I know. No, you're right. You're right. Nobody, many much greater men than me have made this claim, but nobody gets saved from watching how Andrew lives. No one gets saved from watching how Alan lives.

There's no, in fact, if we live that mentality, what happens is people think that, you know what, I'm just as good as Alan, right? And in some cases, in a certain sense, they're right. And so it actually just damns them all the worst because it offers them no hope.